By Mathias Risse, Harvard University
The views expressed below are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights or Harvard Kennedy School. These perspectives have been presented to encourage debate on important public policy challenges.
Both men are Americans. Both claim the Christian tradition. But only one of them is actually within it.
1. Our Man in Rome, in Times of War
A little under a year ago, when the cardinals assembled in Rome elected Robert Francis Prevost as pope — the first American ever to hold that office — I wrote that this was, from a human-rights standpoint, very good news. "It is too early to judge," I added, though the signals were encouraging. Prevost took the name Leo, lion, becoming the fourteenth of that name and placing himself in the tradition of Catholic social thought inaugurated by Leo XIII's 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum. He embodies a side of America that the Statue of Liberty represents — an America of mission, of service, of Panamerican solidarity.
Leo XIV was, I suggested, "our man in Rome," both for those who care about human rights and for those who care about American soft power. As civilian casualties keep mounting in Iran — and they include almost 200 deaths, apparently mostly children in a misguided attack on an elementary school in the war’s opening hours — the cautious optimism of a year ago can and must now be replaced by a more confident but also more urgent message.
The extraordinary fact of an American pope, which I then assessed in the abstract, has been tested by concrete and terrible events. The test result is clear: Leo XIV is not merely a symbol of what America can be. He is, in real time, representing the morally upright side of the Western tradition against the warmongering side currently in charge of the American government. That side has brought upon Iran and the world the calamity they themselves call Epic Fury. The contrast that seemed intellectually interesting a year ago has become, in the most literal sense, a matter of life and death.
The stakes, moreover, are larger than one war. What is contested in the confrontation between Leo XIV's witness and Pete Hegseth's ostentatious belligerence is not merely a policy disagreement about Iran. It is a contest between two visions of world order. One vision is the universalist architecture, in this concrete version built painstakingly after 1945: the idea that certain principles — about human life, rights, and the conduct of war — apply to everyone, everywhere, regardless of power. The other is a world organized, as the German legal theorist Carl Schmitt envisioned, into Great Spaces dominated by imperial powers, where universal norms are no longer operative and the strong simply do what they can.
The Trump administration, and especially its currently most bellicose voice, Hegseth, is building toward that second world. Leo XIV, standing in the lineage of Augustine and Aquinas but also of Francis Lieber — the American who made pathbreaking contributions to the development of the laws of war in the 19th century — is insisting on the first. Donald Trump’s shocking rhetoric about bombing Iran “back to the Stone Ages” makes clear that Hegseth speaks for the Trump administration as a whole.
2. Two Americans, Two Prayers
No single juxtaposition captures the current situation more sharply than that between two acts of public prayer that recently took place within days of each other.
In the week before Palm Sunday, Hegseth convened a prayer service at the Pentagon. He read aloud a prayer that he said had been shared with him by the commander of the U.S. strike against Venezuela. Looking skyward, Hegseth addressed "Almighty God" and asked: "Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation." He prayed for "wisdom in every decision, endurance for the trial ahead, unbreakable unity, and overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy."
On Palm Sunday itself, Leo XIV stood at St. Peter's for Mass and spoke in pointed contrast. "Brothers and sisters," he said, "this is our God: Jesus, King of Peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war. He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them, saying, 'Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: your hands are full of blood.'" The quotation is from the Book of Isaiah: Scripture recognized by Christians and Jews alike.
Later, in a Holy Thursday homily at the Basilica of St. John Lateran, Leo sharpened the point without naming Hegseth: "We tend to consider ourselves powerful when we dominate, victorious when we destroy our equals, great when we are feared. God has given us an example — not of how to dominate, but of how to liberate; not of how to destroy life, but of how to give it."
And the difference between them runs deeper than theology. The difference runs to the question of what Western civilization is, what it stands for, and what responsibilities it imposes on those who claim its inheritance.
Those two prayers represent two entirely different appropriations of the same religious tradition. One prays for rounds to find their mark; the other quotes Isaiah on hands full of blood. One invokes Christ to authorize maximum lethality; the other insists that Christ cannot be used to justify war. Both men are Americans. Both claim the Christian tradition. But only one of them is actually within it. And the difference between them runs deeper than theology. The difference runs to the question of what Western civilization is, what it stands for, and what responsibilities it imposes on those who claim its inheritance.
3. The Deep Roots of Leo's Position
To understand why Leo’s position is not merely politically convenient but theologically and historically well-grounded, it is worth tracing the tradition he inhabits. That tradition is ancient, and it has specifically Christian — and, in its modern form, specifically American — roots.
Western civilization is often said to rest on three foundations: Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome. That triad is frequently invoked in conservative thought, not least in the tradition from which Hegseth claims to draw. But if one takes those three foundations seriously, the road from all three leads to Leo XIV, not to the Pentagon prayer service.
Jerusalem means, at its core, a story about vulnerability and love. A child born to parents turned away; a savior who begins life in a stable; gospels that insist on welcoming the stranger and loving one's enemies. The Christian moral tradition that emerged from Jerusalem urgently needed to reckon with the question of violence once Christianity had become the religion of the Roman Empire. It did so through Augustine in the fifth century. Confronted with the challenge of governing a Christian empire that faced military threats, Augustine developed the foundational framework for when war can be just. He identified three necessary conditions: just cause, right authority, and — crucially — right intention.
War could not be waged in a spirit of hatred, cruelty, or vengeance. Its aim must be the restoration of peace and order, not the expression of fury.
Thomas Aquinas systematized these conditions in the thirteenth century in the Summa Theologiae, drawing directly on Augustine. Later thinkers — Vitoria, Suárez, Grotius — elaborated the rules of proportionality and the protection of innocents that would become the foundations of modern international humanitarian law.
Athens means a commitment to truth, evidence, and critical inquiry — to the idea that reality must be faced honestly, including uncomfortable realities about one's own conduct. Rome means the principle that law stands above individual rulers, that the whims of one man cannot override the legal order. Put together, these three foundations give us a tradition in which even the most powerful actors must accept that they operate under rules rather than merely under orders.
A war waged as retribution — with "death and destruction from the sky all day long," in Hegseth's own words, with "violent effect, not politically correct" as the governing maxim — is not a just war under the tradition Hegseth claims to represent.
The central point cannot be overstated: "epic fury" would not have qualified as right intention under any version of this tradition. Not under Augustine. Not under Aquinas. Not under any of the scholastic thinkers who worked within Christian frameworks. A war waged as retribution — with "death and destruction from the sky all day long," in Hegseth's own words, with "violent effect, not politically correct" as the governing maxim — is not a just war under the tradition Hegseth claims to represent.
It is something the tradition explicitly and repeatedly condemns. Leo XIV is not engaged in political point-scoring when he says that military domination is "entirely foreign to the way of Jesus Christ."
He is stating what the Christian tradition has held for sixteen centuries.
4. Hegseth's Abandonment of the Western and American Tradition
The contrast between Leo XIV and Hegseth is not merely one between two temperaments or political positions. It is a contrast between someone who inhabits the mainstream of the Western Christian tradition and someone who has placed himself outside it, but who has done so while loudly claiming that tradition's authority.
A useful calibration is offered by a comparison with Secretary of State Marco Rubio. At the Munich Security Conference in February, Rubio gave a speech that invoked Western civilization, Christian heritage, and the glories of Western expansion. His speech was wrong in important ways: it sanitized the history of colonialism, ignored the human rights framework, and treated migration as pure civilizational threat.
But for all its distortions, Rubio's speech was recognizably within the Western tradition, reconnecting to some of its uglier strands — the triumphalist imperial narrative, the closure of universal concern within civilizational boundaries — while still operating with reference to that tradition's vocabulary and self-understanding. Rubio's road from Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome led to a dark place, but it was still a road from those cities.
Hegseth's road leads nowhere near them. There is no mainstream strand of Christian thinking that can accommodate "epic fury" or prayers for "overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy." One would need to invoke providential nationalism, or the idea of America as a chosen nation with a divine mandate that licenses such fury. Such strands do exist in American history, but they have constantly been contested from within Christianity itself.
The specific American contribution to that struggle deserves emphasis, because it is a contribution of which Americans should be proud and which Hegseth's posture directly betrays. The Lieber Code of 1863 — drafted by the German-American scholar Francis Lieber for President Lincoln's administration during the Civil War — was the first modern, comprehensive codification of the laws and customs of war. Article 15 of the Code states the governing principle with exemplary clarity: "Men who take up arms against one another in public war do not cease on this account to be moral beings, responsible to one another and to God."
The Code's governing idea was that "military necessity" is real but never a blank check. It enshrined the distinction between combatants and noncombatants, the principle of proportionality, and the rejection of wanton cruelty. The United States did not merely adopt humanitarian law; it authored one of its first modern, comprehensive statements.
From the Lieber Code, the line runs directly to America's central role in the Hague Regulations of 1899 and 1907, to its key role in the 1949 Geneva Conventions, to the Nuremberg tribunals where American prosecutors and judges played a central role in defining war crimes as offenses for which individuals could be held personally responsible.
And in 1947, the country institutionally marked this entire evolution by abolishing the Department of War and creating the Department of Defense — a terminological shift that reflected the post-Nuremberg principle that force is legitimate only in self-defense or pursuant to collective security. No other country in the world has a Secretary of War. Pete Hegseth does.
What Hegseth seeks to dismantle is not merely a set of professional military norms. He seeks to dismantle the universalist architecture — the idea that certain principles constrain all actors, that even the most powerful nation must accept that its soldiers operate under rules. That architecture — given its most consequential modern form in the decades after 1945 — is precisely what the Schmittian world of Great Spaces replaces with raw hierarchy.
In that world, there are no universal norms, only spheres of imperial influence. "The strong do what they can," as Thucydides put it, "and the weak suffer what they must." Hegseth's "Epic Fury" is an announcement that the United States has already moved decisively into that world.
5. The Authority Leo Brings to This Confrontation
What makes Leo XIV's engagement with this crisis especially significant is that he speaks not merely as a theological authority but from a position of deeply personal connection to the regions and peoples affected by this war and by the broader pattern of American military aggression.
On his mother's side, Leo has four generations of Cuban ancestry. As Bishop of Chiclayo in northern Peru, he led the Church's efforts to welcome many thousands of Venezuelan refugees who arrived after the collapse of Chávez's regime. He served as Bishop of Chiclayo until 2023 and holds dual Peruvian citizenship — making him, as I noted last year, not merely the first American pope but also the first Peruvian one, a man who genuinely embodies Panamerican unity.
During the conclave that elected him, he deepened his acquaintance with Cardinal Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem and the most prominent Catholic leader in the Middle East. He visited Lebanon in December — a visit that in retrospect looks adroitly timed — where he spoke of "disarming our hearts" and of Lebanon as "a prophetic sign of justice and peace for the whole of the Levant." He has since spoken by telephone with Israeli President Isaac Herzog, reiterating the importance of dialogue and a just and lasting peace.
When Leo told CNN's Vatican correspondent that he hoped President Trump was "looking for an off-ramp," the formulation was careful, but the intention was clear: this is a war that must end, and the moral weight of the papacy is placed against its continuation.
One of the deepest challenges to universalism in our time is what might be called the hierarchy of grief — the political and psychological tendency to individuate the suffering of those close to us while reducing the suffering of others to statistics. The names, stories, and family histories of those we identify with circulate widely; the victims of our military actions abroad tend to appear primarily as numbers, or as collateral in a strategic narrative.
Leo XIV, by contrast, insists on the equal moral worth of every human being. When he quotes Isaiah — "your hands are full of blood" — he is refusing the hierarchy of grief. He is insisting that the children of Iran are as fully human as the children of Chicago, and that a Christianity which treats their deaths as acceptable collateral damage has severed its most essential moral commitment.
Leo has not sought confrontation for its own sake. He has worked through proxies — encouraging American bishops to strongly support immigrants during Trump's deportation campaign — and has mentioned Trump by name only when asked by a reporter. The restraint is itself a form of authority. When Leo does speak directly, as he has been doing with increasing clarity this Holy Week, his words come across as products of considered moral judgment, not political reflex.
Leo XIV, by contrast...is insisting that the children of Iran are as fully human as the children of Chicago, and that a Christianity which treats their deaths as acceptable collateral damage has severed its most essential moral commitment.
This is the difference between the prophetic and the polemical. The man who carried the wooden cross through the Way of the Cross at the Colosseum on Good Friday — against the backdrop of the Roman Empire, which exercised power through violence — is making a statement that no social media post or Pentagon briefing can easily answer.
6. The Two Americas, Revisited
A year ago, I observed that some of Trump's supporters had noted, with some resentment, that the new pope did not "put America first." I suggested that he did indeed put America first — except it was the America represented by the Statue of Liberty and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the America of Eleanor Roosevelt's leadership of the commission that drafted that Declaration, the America that designed the UN system as a global adaptation of the New Deal's commitment to economic security and fairness.
That argument now has, if anything, greater force. But the framing needs to be sharpened. The difference between the two Americas is a difference about what Western identity fundamentally is: a possession and a license for power, or a set of responsibilities.
The Trump administration — with Hegseth as its most bellicose voice — represents an America that treats Western identity as possession: a heritage to be defended, a civilization to be projected, a power to be unleashed. On this view, Western identity authorizes unconstrained force because the West is what is worth defending, and defending it justifies whatever means are necessary. Rights are "ours"; law protects "us"; history is a story of our greatness.
This is a trophy more than a tradition.
Leo XIV represents an America that understands Western identity as responsibility: a demanding inheritance that calls its bearers to face honestly what the West has done in the world, and to maintain universal commitments even when they are costly. He is engaging in what I have called Critical Inheritance — taking the tradition seriously while refusing to treat it as a museum of flattering images.
He is also practicing what I have called Uncomfortable Universalism — holding fast to the claim that every human being has equal moral standing, even when that claim costs something. He is committed to Institutional Experimentalism — the belief that the post-1945 architecture of human rights and humanitarian law represents a genuine achievement of the Western tradition, to be defended and refined rather than discarded when inconvenient. The man who tears up his Harvard diploma on live television is, among other things, repudiating all three stances simultaneously.
The AI image has been answered by the living man. And the man whose real hands wash the feet of priests is answering the man whose prayers ask that every round find its mark.
There is also a profound irony in the dynamics of this confrontation. The Trump administration is heavily Catholic in its composition. Shortly after Prevost's election, Trump had an AI-generated image of himself as pope distributed on White House social media. The gesture was characteristic: an appropriation of symbolism without any of the substance. Now the actual pope, an actual American, is standing in direct opposition to the actual policies of the actual American government. The AI image has been answered by the living man. And the man whose real hands wash the feet of priests is answering the man whose prayers ask that every round find its mark.
7. Soft Power at Its Most Genuine
Shortly before his death, the distinguished international relations scholar Joseph Nye argued that the Trump administration was damaging American soft power. Nye coined that term, defining it as "the ability to affect others without the use of coercion or payment, by means of attraction." Soft power is specifically about attraction — not merely any non-military form of influence, but the kind of pull that a country generates when the world finds what it stands for worth emulating. And it can be built and eroded. It responds to what a country does, what it defends, and whether its conduct matches its stated values.
Nye understood that human rights were central to American soft power. "America's reputation for protecting human rights, for standing up for individual liberties and freedoms," he argued, "is a great source of soft power and attraction in the rest of the world." This was not sentimentality. It was analysis: what makes America attractive, what generates the pull that allows it to achieve its goals without coercion, is substantially its association with human dignity and universal values. When that association frays, the attraction dims. "When you ignore soft power," Nye warned, "it turns out to be quite costly."
To be sure, the damage Hegseth can do to American soft power has limits, because soft power is not only a government matter. Nye was clear on this: it is not presidents alone who generate soft power, but also American civil society. "One way or another, we all reflect to the world the attractiveness of being American." Leo XIV is, among other things, an expression of American civil society, of what America produces when it is at its best.
There is a specific irony worth naming: it was at the Harvard Kennedy School — the very institution Hegseth severed all military ties with in February 2026 — that Nye founded the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy (now the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights) in 1999, the institutional expression of his conviction that human rights are central to American soft power.
Nye also proposed, in his work on presidential ethics, a "three-dimensional" framework that assesses foreign policy decisions by their intentions, their means, and their consequences. It is striking how precisely this maps onto the structure of just war theory: just cause corresponds to intentions; right intention and discrimination correspond to means; proportionality and long-term consequences correspond to outcomes.
Both frameworks insist that moral assessment cannot stop at motivation — that how a war is fought, and what it produces, matter as much as why it was started. By either standard, "Epic Fury" fails at every level: its stated rationale includes vengeance and "retribution"; its means include explicit contempt for the rules designed to protect civilians; and its consequences have already included the deaths of hundreds of civilians, many of them children, with the generational hatreds and strategic damage that follow.
Leo XIV, applying the logic of just war theory and the logic of Nye's three-dimensional ethics simultaneously, is stating the obvious: this war does not pass the moral test that the Western tradition imposes on those who claim its authority.
8. The Lion and the Fury
"Leo," again, means lion. "Epic Fury" means what it says. The confrontation between the fourteenth lion and the epic fury is not only a contest between two visions of Christianity. It is a contest about what kind of world we inhabit. The world of "Epic Fury" is the world Thucydides described, where the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.
It is the Schmittian world of Great Spaces, where universal norms are instruments of power rather than genuine constraints, where sovereignty is a privilege of the powerful, and where the children of Iran count for less than the children of Chicago because Iran is the weaker country. It is a world in which universalism has been reduced from a regulative ideal to a rhetorical device deployed cynically by those who no longer believe in it.
Leo XIV is insisting on a different world. He is insisting on the world that the Western tradition, at its best, has always aspired to build — the world of the Geneva Conventions and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, of the Lieber Code and the Nuremberg tribunals, of the post-1945 institutional architecture that sought to ensure that never again would the strong simply do what they can. He is insisting on this not as naive idealism but as the direct implication of a tradition that runs from Augustine through Aquinas through Lieber to the architects of international humanitarian law.
The first Leo famously stood up to Attila the Hun and persuaded him not to invade Italy. Leo XIII gave Catholic social thought the systematic form it needed for the industrial age. What Leo XIV is doing in April 2026 is something different in kind but continuous in spirit: he is bearing witness. He is insisting that the Christian tradition cannot be conscripted for epic furies. He is telling us that there is another way of being American and another understanding of what Christian civilization requires.
Whether universalism survives the current moment — whether the regulative ideal that all human beings possess equal moral worth and deserve equal concern under law can be defended against its Schmittian alternative — is one of the defining questions of our time. The world needs that ideal now more than ever: to address climate change, to govern artificial intelligence, to protect the weak from the logic that the strong do what they can.
Our man in Rome is at work. Whether the America he represents can reclaim itself from the America currently in charge is a question that cannot yet be answered. But the fact that he is there — that a man born in Chicago, shaped by Peru, carrying the name of the lion, is standing in the lineage of Augustine, Aquinas, and Lieber, against the Pentagon prayer for rounds to find their mark — is itself a form of hope. It is, for those who care about what the West has achieved at its best, and what America has sometimes been at its best, a reason to hold on.
